There’s a huge percentage of the community that hates this game. It’s my favourite in the series but so many people say it’s nothing more than a fan mod and compare it to Hunt Down the Freeman, despite it being commercially sold and endorsed by Valve
I'm on your team. Black Mesa is my favorite game, ever. Period. And as such my favorite Half Life have too.
The original HL is the first game I ever played. I think it's probably one of if not the most impactful games for the industry to ever come out. Even with that, Black Mesa and BM Blue Shift are just so wonderful.
Fingers crossed for an eventual Black Mesa: Opposing Force brother 🤝
Black Mesa: Military already exists, though it's a WIP
BM Blue Shift is the best looking out of any game in the HL series but the gameplay is ass.
play more games
It is literally Half life 1 remake
Eh, Black Mesa is great, but took some big liberties?
Like On A Rail. I know that chapter is divisive due to the vehicle gimmick, but it's still basically a completly different level in BM vs the original.
Well, this is what remake is for
True, but I personally enjoyed that level in the original Half-Life, so thought it was a very disappointing cut instead of a modernization.
I didnt like that either but theres a workshop addon that adds the cut location with one click and is kinda amazing
Oh, neat!
I'll check it out, thank you.
Ofc its called On a rail uncut
I mean you can hate it all you want.
A lot of official remakes are hated. But you cant deny it is indeed half life 1 remake
I never said that. I outright used the words: Black Mesa is great.
I was just disapointed in some of the big changes & creative choices.
It's literally not
What? how it is not?
Remake implies it is made by Valve or collaborated at least. It's a fan reimagination. It's a Half Life 2 mod at the end of the day.
Remake doesn't imply anything like that. It's an unofficial remake.
It does though. It's literally a trademark/copyright issue to call something a remake that is not sanctioned as such by the original devs. Valve gave no such sanction, but allowed the game to exist under another name, because it is in fact not a remake, but a fan reimagination.
I mean it's a remake and if Valve didn't sue them to oblivion and destroy it then it's valid in the public consciousness. Remakes don't have to involve the original creators in any form. Typically it's seen that the project needs to be "legal". But even then copyright is a temporary made up idea. Can you not remake a film out of copyright? You can call it a "fan remake" I guess but it's got Valve's official blessing.
Yes other companies sometimes remake or remaster games, because they were contracted to, and there's a huge difference there. Valve didn't oversee any of Black Mesas development, it is not a remake even 1%
In Crowbar Collectives own words from their steam page "Black Mesa is the fan-made reimagining of Valve Software's Half-Life."
Even the devs themselves were careful not to use the word remake, because it's not one.
It's still Half Life lol
Games are remade all the time by different teams
Yes and they are sanctioned by the publishers whereas Black Mesa was not. It is in no way advertised as a remake. In Crowbar Collectives own words "Black Mesa is the fan-made reimagining of Valve Software's Half-Life."
And even all those games that get "remade" by another team are generally remasters. Shadow of the collosus, demon souls, metal gear solid 3, gears of war, halo... All use the the original game as a base and basically just paint on top of it, the core of the game is still there.
How about this. You win! 🥇
Now excuse me while I go play my favourite Half-Life remake. Black Mesa.
Comparing Black Mesa to Hunt down the Freeman is beyond criminal.
It's a half-life game, sure, maybe not an official one, but defo a half-life game
Valve literally endorsed the game.
Black mesa rocks!
I'll never understand that hate. For me, Black Mesa, despite not being an official Valve game, is just another Half-Life title.
Black Mesa is a Half-Life game period. I love BM and HL1 and every year in December I play the whole Half-Life series included Black Mesa.
r/halflife isn't even a half-life sub any more. It's mental illness.
I'm 100% with you on this. I've loved Half-Life 1 since launch. If hard pressed, I'd still say it's my favourite game. There are some tonal shifts in how it handles the ending that I still prefer the original version, but on the whole, Black Mesa is as close to a perfect remake as anyone could hope to get. I definitely see it as an official part of the franchise. I'd probably even advise new players to start with Black Mesa and then try going back to the original, just so they don't get put off on the whole franchise by the originals crustiness (even though I do think it holds up very well today, but the youngns have different frameworks)
this nakula guy coping hard over Black Mesa being an excellent game 😭
I believe that nakula is freshbreadlington, it's the same person.
Black Mesa IS HALF-LIFE, whoever thinks otherwise is a douchebag
Half-Life is Half-Life.
Ok but it's not though
Fucking half-lifers
I've been playing half-life since launch (hl1, tfc, vampire slayer mod, natural selection mod, counter strike mod). I have the halflife logo tattooed lol. Love the game and series and believe it's been a turning point for pc gaming since launch and especially hl2 on source engine. I've waited YEARS to play black mesa and finally am now, today, having never played it. Amazing to to hl1 remade like this as a finished product.
If you ask me, yes it's hl1 BUT not hl1 as it was released (obviously being a remake). But it IS hl1 entirely remade for true hardcore fans on source engine
It’s a good one too
Hunt down the Freeman is also commercially sold and endorsed by valve lol
Black Mesa is cool and very impressive especially for a fan project but it’s not a “definitive” remake. It takes way too many liberties especially with Xen and I would argue they actually made Xen WORSE than the original, mostly due to just how frickin long it is now. Yeah Xen in OG half life sucked but at least it was short, now in Black Mesa it’s nearly the length of an entire game by itself and it just keeps going and going it’s pacing is so, so bad and there’s some parts of it that genuinely do not feel like Half-Life like the gauntlet in Interloper where you’re given infinite gluon-gun ammo and have to fight a million controllers while you ascend in an elevator. I really dislike the amount of plug puzzles across all of Xen as well, they aren’t fun they’re boring and there’s SO many of them. The performance is also pretty bad at times throughout all of Black Mesa and especially during Xen, I think they went a little too far with the amount of objects in the world which is not helping the frame rate at all and just makes everything feel cluttered. Genuinely, look at any room in Black Mesa and tell me there aren’t an absurd number of wooden crates there that add nothing to the game. It’s got a bit of that modern Halo problem where they think more stuff makes it more detailed and better when it’s just making it feel messy.
Im sorry, r/halflife is not usually like this, they're going through a rough period in their life. We have to be supportive of them, help them get back up on their legs, you know?
I really want to play it in VR. Can somebody make it happen and take my money?
I’m actually playing BM in VR right now, but it’s a mod of HL2E2 that uses most of the assets from Black mesa. It’s got quite a few rough edges that we’d need the BM source code to fix but it does work and most levels are playable, only with the HL2 weapons and enemy AI though
I liked it haha
No way! I believe they all too tied with hopium to hate someone.
BM admittedly did do things better, but also missed the mark on things HL1 did better
Also, Xen did not need to be 8 hours of obvious padding, when it's supposed to be the climax of the story
Xen is too long but an objective improvement. What else do you think HL1 did better?
The tentacle monster had special behaviors, for instance if you stopped making noise in blast pit, the creature would calm down after a certain amount of time. HL1 had several other such things, I was honestly surprised BM glossed over such details. It's a nitpick, I know
But it isn't, and that's not hate. It's simply not made by valve. It's a fan game and there's nothing wrong with that.
If a fan makes a fan made gta game, it doesn't make it a gta game, just a fan made gta game. It's basic ownership and copyright. Whoever owns the ip owns the canon, simple thing. The fact that they allow it to be sold it's because valve is cool. But don't confuse them being cool with endorsement or them canonicity.
I actually love black mesa and I prefer it over the original, but it ain't a half life game bro. (Although i wish it didn't crashed as hard on linux and the light wasn't broken in many levels, i would play it more often because it genuinely one of the bst games I've ever played)
The soundtrack in Black Mesa is fucking incredible too. I’ll never not gush over Surface Tension 1 and On A Rail 2
Black Mesa is better than Half Life. Let's face it
Lmao, it’s literally a Half-Life fanmade remake, obviously won’t be the same as the original because that would be only a port, you just have to appreciate it for what it is, a reimagined world of how Half-Life could it be in modern times.
honestly, who cares. they're technically correct, but practically wrong. let them.
I would love to actually love BM too, but the performance Is atrocius. That killed the game for me.
It runs great on steam deck, if that can run it most systems can as well
"That's not how it works, that's not how any of this works"
Valve, please fix.
I’m not gonna like… murder you over it, but I really don’t think BM is a good remake. Like look at the HECU. In HL1, they can’t shoot while moving. If they’re moving, they’re sprinting. So as a player you need to take advantage of this weakness. If you peek and just try to trade damage with them, you’ll probably die or come close to it (I also play on hard, I think it’s a great difficulty for the game.) So you have to learn, what gets them moving? Hiding only half works, often they’ll throw a grenade if you just hide. However, this same tactic works against them, if you throw a grenade they’ll run (or duck) and then they’re vulnerable. Grenades rarely kill them on their own so you have to expose yourself to shoot them as well. In nearly every encounter, you’re outnumbered, but not ridiculously so. HL1’s HECU encounters were very tailored sometimes. Add or take one marine away and you may end up really fucking up or changing the encounter. When I played Black Mesa, the HECU were just combine soldiers who could shoot while moving with their speed slightly turned up. There was no real tactic that worked on them other than generic hide/shoot gameplay you can find in any shooter. Even the combine worked better tactically. There was one level I remember in BM, on the surface. There were legitimately just like 10 soldiers in a group really far away just running at you and shooting at you. It felt like some bad Gmod addon for a second. Just a clump of NPCs running across a map too big to make fighting them interesting. Another level, at the top of some missile silo, again there were just a fuckload of soldiers and there weren’t really any tactics it was just reactionary hiding and shooting and running. HL1’s tagline was Run. Think. Shoot. Live. BM removed the think. In no HECU encounter was I ever in a place where I felt like I was defeating them with actual tactics, I would just be running around and popping them as loud techno played. That lobby fight where they rope down from the skylight, there wasn’t a single moment to think, it was just pumping fast paced action gameplay. Now, note that I don’t necessarily find some sections bad, some were still fun but as a HL remake it didn’t have the same feel as HL.
The shipping crate warehouse with the black ops assassins in BM is horrible. It’s very hard to spot them because there’s just visual clutter everywhere. Their ai is overtuned or something too. They runshootrunshoot unbelievably fast (the original assassins were like this too but in BM they were REALLY fucking fast). Again an encounter where in the original game you were encouraged to think, in black mesa it more or less just becomes a test of reaction speed. Also, about the visual clutter, black mesa is a great looking game, but it’s way too noisy. There are so many little props and details and all this shit everywhere. That missile silo level, part of why it was annoying is there’s just so much visual clutter everywhere, it’s hard to even spot the soldiers sometimes. Also I don’t think I like the art direction in BM. It was a little blandly realistic. Like again the HECU, they just kind of generic’d their gear and turned them into modern video game tactical man.
The HECU uses the same HECU irl gear just kept the MP5 overs the M4.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
It's literally a fan game. People who prefer it over the original or even compare it to Valve games genuinely have bad taste. They see graphical fidelity as 'good game'. It's sad actually.
There's one thing that ends up annoying me about stuff like this. Everyone can have their opinions of course, but do people really think a group of modders, passionate as they may be, can just... do what Valve did? Do we know who Valve is? They released so many amazing fucking games. They defined PC gaming from 1998 to the end of the 2000s. A group of modders getting together can't "just make" as good or a better game. It's like when modders make a fan expansion to a game that had professional career writers working on it. A bunch of fans can't "just write" something as good or better. It makes no fucking sense. With Black Mesa, sure they can correct some things that weren't good ideas in the original, like the environmental hazards that had zero warning, or an autosave system, but that's patchwork. Half-Life was revolutionary. Was Black Mesa? No, not at all. It did absolutely nothing new or unique, and sure, it's a remake, but seriously, I rolled my eyes at the part where you burn zombies with flares. It is SUCH a fucking gimmick, something you'd see in like a game from 2005 or something that thinks it's being clever. It wasn't even fun, it was just... there. I could practically hear the devs patting themselves on the back for that section, like "man we made such a thoughtful expansion to the survival horror elements." It's just walking up to zombies holding an item. Compare that section to Ravenholm with the gravity gun, it's not even remotely fucking close. Then the HECU, which were very deliberate in HL1 and fairly simple tactics-wise, they just fuck it completely up and now it's just shoot the generic soldier guy who's shooting at you, cause that's what you do in an FPS game. I mean like I said, even Half-Life 2 despite really slowing the game down, the Combine had some great sections. The Black Mesa HECU have some fast-paced actiony sections, but so does a Call of Duty campaign. Games can be just fun, but the best ones can be "wait, I actually see why it was designed this way."
I actually really dislike the "boomer shooter" community because they don't seem to judge on merit. Usually just vibe. (I promise I'm going somewhere this isn't just an unrelated rant). Duke Nukem 3D and Blood for example, they're just not good games. The start of Duke 3D really sums it up. You shoot the barrels, fall down a vent, take damage, immediately given a medkit, which is already a strange intro to the game, and when you land, the streets are just fucking empty. Then an enemy placed just outside of your FOV on the right shoots you. The only enemy there. If you're on one of the harder difficulties, an enemy is shooting you from a window too, one you can't see through, there's just bullets coming from a wall texture. Blood is a nightmare line-up of awkward gimmicks and terrible level design. Enemy placement is unbelievable, it's clear the developers were trying as hard as they could to make the game "difficult", which, mediocre designers will often do by purposefully placing enemies in annoying places, putting way too many enemies, and making level design/encounters that purposefully do not really give the player many options. It's a savescum shooter. Then you play Doom 1. You understand each weapon and monster's role, respect it, you enter a room cluttered with enemies, you don't panic or die immediately, you know exactly what you need to do, because enemies are simple and fill roles. The game does force pressure often with monster closets/teleports, however most of the time you can absolutely react to them in time (unless it's a shotgunner ambush, which is sometimes an issue. Shotgunners on an elevator for instance, terrible design, they start aiming at you the second they see your flat-top and you can't really react before they fire.) Level design did get kind of annoying to navigate, but as combat rooms, the levels were actually really solid. E1 despite being fairly easy, you can feel the intent in action. When you look at Black Mesa, I cannot tell you the intent for firefights beyond "reaction shooter" which again can be fun but it's such a low bar. Look at fan WADs for Doom. There are some of the best levels you'll play in an FPS in some of those fan WADs. Not just because of the community's talent and dedication, but because of the base game. Enemies have clear use for designers, and clear strategies for players. Weapons fill specific roles and are simple and consistent (except the BFG, fuckin hate that thing). When Black Mesa just spams down 40 soldiers, it's just them trying to make it epic. They're not incompetent but they're not smart designers.
I agree with you 100%. You are someone who actually pays attention to game design like myself. Fans and modders are just that, they are not professionals, not yet at least.
The audacity to think some modders can out design one of the objectively best game devs in the world is astounding.
I also rolled my eyes and felt the same about the flare and zombie section of BM, it felt super amateur, as well as most of the game honestly. The soldiers felt incredibly generic, the game was actually designed and balanced around the fact that grunts couldn't shoot and run at the same time and that was all thrown out the window.
It's a fun game, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, but it is a far cry from a Valve game, and calling it a replacement to HL1 is laughable if not offensive.
What in the hipster bullshit?
Black Mesa is very good game, fantastic, ffs it's a remake of the best gamer ever... But it's not a replacement of the original work... You can't say by playing Black Mesa i'v played Half-Life, it's not the same thing.
Hard agree
Don't know why this mfs downvote me!!!
Zoomers who equate polygon density to good game
This people are crazy i swear, fake players.
It isn't part of the series, it's a 3rd party remake that literally started its life as a mod, nothing more to it than that. The fact that Valve allowed them to do it commercially doesn't somehow magically make it officially part the series in any way.
But does that downplay its quality?
If someone/a team remakes a game to the best of their ability (albeit with some QoL changes) that doesn't make it a game in that series.
Black Mesa is as much of a Half-Life game as Half-Life: Echoes or Entropy Zero is. Doesn't matter if it tells the same story. It can be put in the same bucket as Half-Life games, but it isn't a Half-Life game. It's a Source mod.
You trying to say that other Games Are official, and Black Mesa isn’t.
Yes
You're confusing "game in the same universe" with "official vs unofficial game".
It's not any more a source mod than Half-Life 2 episodes or CS Source are source mods.
Those games are all developed partly or fully by Valve, and published by Valve. CS Source is a fully-fledged standalone Source game. Episode 1 and Episode 2 are official expansions for Half-Life 2.
To my knowledge, games/additions/expansions/other titles that are developed by the game's original dev studio and also happen to use the same base/assets/engine/code are never defined as mods. Mods by definition must come from a third-party with no official connection to the studio that made the main game.
If the developers of a mod are hired by the base game's studio to continue development of their mod officially under the banner of the studio itself, then it ceases to be a mod. Counter-Strike is a prime example of this. It began as a mod for Half-Life, then when the devs were hired, Counter-Strike became a Valve property, ceased being a mod and became a Valve game. All releases up to and including the one before Valve took on the IP are classified as mods, and the first release under the Valve name is not a mod.
It is a half-life game
Gnope!
Great remake of Half-Life 1. Still not a Half-Life game, because it's not made by the IP owners. Shrek: Retold isn't a Shrek movie, it's a fan remake. Same goes for Black Mesa with Half-Life.
Shrek: Retold is my favorite Shrek movie
To further drive the point, the Half-Life (series)) Wikipedia page has it in the "other games" section. If it were a game in the Half-Life series, it would be in the main body of the article, and in the release timeline.
Stay mad, downvoters. It'll never make you right
I don’t think the downvotes are mad, you’re just wrong. If it’s listed on the Half Life wiki, it’s official.
That's factually untrue. Valve have nothing to do with the Half-Life wiki. It's editable by anyone and not curated by Valve, so regardless of what info is ok the wiki it's not an official information source... especially for things like this.
I'd like to add that in no place ok the wiki page does it state that Black Mesa is a Half-Life game. The first sentence says it's a fan-made remake, and the second calls it a mod. Both of these directly contradict that statement. Entropy Zero also has an entry on the wiki. That also doesn't make it a Half-Life game.
To be a Half-Life game, a game needs to either be developed by Valve, or developed under another studio who is under contract by Valve to develop a Half-Life game. Black Mesa falls under neither of these stipulations.
By this logic, Fallout 3 isn't an actual Fallout game since it was developed by Bethesda, instead of Black Isle studios. No matter how much you are trying to push this dude, none of what you have said makes Black Mesa "factually" not a Half-Life game.
Fallout 3 was developed by the IP owner at the time, fulfilling the condition that allows it to be a Fallout game. My logic stands.
So is Fallout New Vegas considered a Fallout game then, since it was developed by Obsidian and published by Bethesda? No matter how you try to frame this argument, you are reaching.
Fallout New Vegas fulfills condition two: a game developed under a contractual agreement with the IP owner. Logic stands.
You're trying so hard for this to be a black and white argument, but it's not. The world doesn't work that way dude. AM2R for example is by definition a Metroid game, despite not being under contract and not having the IP be owned by the creators. Argue all you want about how you don't want Black Mesa to be a Half Life game, but it is. You are trying to frame it based on those two conditions, which covers the legal aspects of it, but there are numerous other conditions that determine whether something is "a game" in that specific universe or not. The same argument could be made for whether cereal is a soup, or a pop tart a ravioli.
AM2R is an unofficial remake, with no endorsement or involvement from the IP owners. It's not an official Metroid game, and cannot be counted as a Metroid game from a legal/IP standpoint. It is a game. It is a game about Metroid even, but it is not a METROID GAME in the sense that is not an entry in the Metroid series.
It IS a black-and-white argument. The legal distinction is the binding factor. If the developers of AM2R or Black Mesa tried to claim that those games were Metroid or Half-Life games (they do not), they would get in trouble, because that would imply the IP owners' involvement and affect their public image.